Nelson Mandela toiled to dismantle entrenched apartheid

By CNN Staff

updated 5:13 AM EST, Fri December 6, 2013

Nelson Mandela speaks outside his former prison cell during a press conference in 2003 on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. From the mid-1960s through 1991, the island served as a maximum-security prison, mostly housing offenders of political offenses. Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison on Robben Island. From 1964 to 1982, Mandela was incarcerated at Robben Island Prison in the cell shown. In 1990, he was freed.

Mandela stayed in this prison cell on Robben Island.

An aerial view shows the entire island, which is approximately 5 square miles (13 square kilometers).

Group prison barracks sit empty in the facility.

The last of the political prisoners on Robben Island were released in 1991, and until 1996 the island was used as a medium-security prison for criminal offenders.

(CNN) -- In 1948, a new word appeared in the vocabulary of South Africans, destined to symbolize racial oppression the world over.

That word was apartheid, used to describe a policy of segregation and discrimination that aimed to keep blacks and whites apart in every sphere of life.

The Afrikaner-dominated National Party had won a narrow election victory in 1948, and used the word apartheid in a policy statement to describe its segregation program.

The policy divided the South African population into four distinct racial groups -- white, African, colored and Asian -- and a plethora of laws were passed to institutionalize the apartheid system.

2000: Nelson Mandela recalls prison release

1990: Mandela addresses his supporters

Nelson Mandela dead at 95

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

In Mandela's own words

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In Mandela's own words

Nelson Mandela dead at 95

The Population Registration Act required all South Africans to register with the government according to their race.

Interracial sex and marriage was prohibited, and each of the racial groups was required to live separately. Other laws segregated South Africans in buses, taxis, trains, hotels, restaurants and waiting rooms.

The Communist Party also was outlawed, and the government defined membership so broadly it could arrest people indiscriminately, branding them Communists.

Nelson Mandela, who has died at age 95 after years of health ailments, was born in 1918 in a South Africa where segregation of black and white was already on the statutes.

The son of a tribal chief, he grew up in a rural community in Eastern Cape where the color of his skin designated him a second-class citizen under law.

Blacks had subpar job opportunities

In the years following the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, legislation came into force making it a criminal offense for blacks to break a labor contract, and which restricted them to unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 separated South Africa into areas in which either blacks or whites could own land.

Blacks, constituting two-thirds of the population, were restricted to 7.5% of the land. Whites, making up one-fifth of the population, were given 92.5%.

It took Mandela a lifetime of struggle, including 27 years of imprisonment, to undo legislation that denied Africans basic freedoms enjoyed by the descendants of white European colonists.

In practice, it was blacks that had to move, often under threat or use of force. Between 1963 and 1985, approximately 3.5 million blacks were sent to the homelands, where they added to the already critical problem of overpopulation. Most of the homelands were economic and political disasters.